Welcome to Hero's Hour v.07! This update brings a lot of quality of life and graphical features, and also a few things that will change up gameplay.

I'll get right to the patch notes, and then afterwards, I'll try to reveal what's coming for the next and final update before release.

FEATURES in v07:

• Retouched town screen
• Minecart effect from mines
• Enemy heroes now cast spells
• Town conversion
• Enhanced world generation
• Bonfires
• 8 new maps
  • Small maps with many players
  • Large maps with few players
• Improved map selection screen
• Improved saving and loading and new load game UI
• Two new music tracks for the adventure map

POLISH/CHANGES in v07:

• You can now scroll the game view using WASD and arrow keys
• When reloading the game, the game correctly moves the view over to your hero
• Arena and Sphinx battles no longer act as sieges
• Reordered castle and hero portraits, shrunk hero portraits
• Neutral creatures are less likely to flee 
• Less reduced XP from fighting weaker creatures than your army
• Smaller maps are even smaller
• Overworld resources now sparkle
• Overworld resources now spawn 20% less frequently
• Updated map selection minimap previews
• Greatly reduced chance towns generate close to each-other
• Map generation: Gave regions a minimum size

BUGS FIXED IN v07:

• Game view edge scrolling when tabbed out of game
• Saving and reloading would make heroes disconnect from towns
• Fixed hero and castle buttons highlighting underneath UI
• Fixed a bug that had Healing make infirmaries slower instead of faster
• Fixed a bug that had ranged units attacking walls as if they were not ranged and at long distance
• Fixed a bug that had the battle terrain become foundation if attacked by an enemy while defending a town
• Fixed a crash bug that would rarely occur when victorious in combat
• Adventure map obstacles no longer spill over into territories of other terrains
• Fixed the hook-shaped caches of resources

There's a few more quality-of-life things on my to-do list, such as a tutorial and more resolution compatibility fixes. Those may come as some small v.07x updates, who knows. But what I'll be turning my attention to now is a bit different: 

v08 - The Identity Update sneakpeak

Next update will focus on giving each faction a unique identity. Moreso than that, it will act to distance Hero's Hour from being a straight-up clone of HoMM. 

Planned features include:

• Unique mechanic incl. special town building for each faction
  • Necropolis will get a graveyard instead of infirmary, resurrecting killed enemy creatures instead of friendlies
  • Stronghold may attract and hire nomadic tribes, premade armies which are unable to exchange creatures
  • And five others...
• Different creature strengths for each faction that do not scale linearly
• Each faction gets a set of mutually exclusive creatures
• Factions have unique creature resource cost restrictions
  • For instance, both golems and gargoyles will cost stone, making stone an important resource to academy
• Different factions have access to different hero skills

And a lot more! I'm really excited to work on this next update. If it's feasible, I'll include the option to play the classic version, but believe you me - with all the changes, the Identity mode will be the most interesting way to play.

That's all for now! Have a go at the new update, tell me if despite my best efforts, there's still stuff that's broken - and then come back next week for the Identity Update!

Bug reports can be left here, sent on twitter, or to thingonitsown@gmail.com

- ThingOnItsOwn